18 Families to be Presented with a Legacy for Future Generations

On April 17, Toronto residents
Margaret Kittel Canale and her mother, Vera Kittel, will receive a rare
gift – the manuscript of Vera’s harrowing journey from Germany to
England, and then to Canada, to escape Nazi persecution.
While each story of survival is unique, this one has particular meaning
for the Kittel family. Vera spoke very little about her experiences in
Nazi Germany and during the war, something her family longed to record
before this piece of their history was lost.
Sustaining Memories, a pilot program designed by the Azrieli Foundation
and offered through Ryerson University’s G. Raymond Chang School of
Continuing Education’s Programs for 50+, gave her this opportunity. On
April 17, two days before Yom HaShoah, Holocaust
Remembrance Day, Vera will be presented with her printed story along
with 17 other survivors.

“My
mother found it sad to talk about her family, with only her and her
sister surviving. Whenever she hears people talk about all their
relatives, she realizes how much she has lost. It
has affected her all her life,” said Margaret Kittel Canale, who helped
write her mother’s memoir as part of the pilot program in which
18 mature students (50+) and graduate students at Ryerson University
worked with Holocaust survivors
to produce their written memoirs. The Sustaining Memories project was
motivated by the need for survivor narratives to be preserved as both an
educational tool and a legacy for their families and community.

“I
would have done this program even if I couldn’t have been paired with
my mother,” said Kittel Canale, “but I was grateful that they let me ask
my mother if I could help her write her story.
My mother said she might have held back some things if she had been
talking to a stranger. In some ways it was easier for me to work with
her because I knew the characters and could help fill in some of the
gaps.”

Vera
was eight years old when Hitler came to power and began persecuting
Jews – attacking synagogues, seizing Jewish businesses and rounding up
individuals. In a supreme act of selflessness,
one that she could only truly understand when she became a parent
herself, her parents sent her to England on the
Kindertransport. The decision was so painful, her mother could not even come with her father to the train station to say goodbye.

Through the
Kindertransport,
a rescue mission that took place during the nine months prior to the
outbreak of World War II, the United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000
predominantly
Jewish children from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and
the Free City of Danzig. The children were placed in British foster
homes, hostels and farms. Most of the rescued children survived the war,
but the majority of their parents did not. This
was the case for Vera’s parents who were killed in the Auschwitz death
camp. Their decision to send her away likely saved her life.

It was more than 50 years after the Kindertransport
that Margaret first heard the term for the movement that saved her
mother. Today, she has an even better understanding of her mother’s past
and an appreciation
for her resiliency. “My mother said, ‘We always looked forward, never
back, we needed to find hope for the future.’ It was hope that kept them
moving forward, even when they came to Canada as immigrants and tried
to get ahead.”

On April 17 at 12:30 pm at Kensington Place
Retirement Residence, the program’s 18 survivors and their writing
partners will celebrate the culmination of their work at a private
luncheon with their families where each pair will be presented
with a copy of the memoir, the results of a project that is sure to
have changed the lives of both the writing partners and the survivor
authors forever.

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